June 25, 1978

A Family of Emotions

By EUDORA WELTY

SELECTED STORIES
By V. S. Pritchett.

his great and fascinating writer is about the age
of our century and has written short stories
most of his way through it. With their abundance, they are of equally remarkable variety: Where
would one look for the typical Pritchett story? But one always finds this--that any Pritchett story
is all of it alight and busy at once, like a well-going fire. Wasteless and at the same time well
fed, it shoots up in flame from its own spark like a poem or a magic trick, self-consuming, with
nothing left over. He is one of the great pleasure-givers in our language.

Pritchett himself has said that the short story is his greatest love because he finds it challenging.
The new collection makes it clear that neither the love nor the challenge has let him down.

As ever, the writing spouts with energy, Dialogue, in constant exchange, frisks like a school of
dolphin. These are social stories: Life goes on in them without flagging. The characters
that fill them--erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and
passionate, all peculiar unto themselves--hold a claim on us that is not to be denied. They
demand and get our rapt attention, for in their revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own
lives come into view. How much the eccentric has to tell us of what is central!

Once more, in the present volume, the characters are everything. Through a character Pritchett
can trace a frail thread of chivalry in the throatcutting trade of antique collecting. Through a
character he finds a great deal of intrigue in old age. The whole burden of "The Spree" is grief
and what his character is ever to do with it. Paradox comes naturally to Pritchett, and he has
always preferred, and excelled in, the oblique approach; and I think all these varying stories in
today's book are love stories.

One is called "The Diver." Panicking as his initiation into sex confronts him in the middle-aged
Frenchwoman lying "naked and idle" on her bed--who mocks him with "You have never seen a
woman before?"--the young English boy is surprised by his own brain beginning to act: He
hears himself begin answering her with a preposterous lie. He is into another initiation--he is
becoming a story writer as her stands there quaking. "It was her turn to be frightened." All
being squared, the woman back in her earlier character of "a soft, ordinary, decent woman," that
is when his heart begins to throb. "And everything was changed for me after this."

Of these 14 stories--chosen from four volumes published over the last nine years--"The Diver" is
not the only one here to suggest that, in times of necessity or crisis, a conspiracy may form
among the deep desires of our lives to substitute for one another, to masquerade sometimes as
one another, to support, to save one another. These stories seem to find that human desire is
really a family of emotions, a whole interconnection--not just the patriarch and matriarch,
but all the children. All kin, and none of them born to give up. If anything happens to cut one
off, they go on surviving in one another's skins. They become something new. In fact, they
become storytellers.

In "Blind Love," when Mr. Armitage employs Mrs. Johnson, two people have been brought
together who have been afflicted beyond ordinary rescue. Mr. Armitage is blind; Mrs. Johnson
has a very extensive and horrifying birthmark. Beneath her clothes, "She was stamped with an
ineradicable bloody insult." When she was young and newly married, her husband had sent her
packing for the horror of its surprise, for her having thus "deceived" him. Now "as a punished
and self-hating person, she was drawn to work with a punished man. It was a return to her
girlhood: Injury had led her to injury." In the love affair that grows out of this doubleness,
blindness and deceiving are played against each other, are linked together--as though each
implied the other. How much does each really know? We watch to see what hurt does to vision-
-or for vision; what doubt does to faith, faith to doubt. These two magnetized people
have selves hidden under selves; they have more than one visible or invisible skin. After they
reach and survive a nearly fatal crisis of ambiguous revelation, the only possible kind, we see
them contentedly traveling in tandem. "She has always had a secret. It still pleases Armitage to
baffle people." But they are matched now in "blind love": They depend on each other
altogether.

"The Marvelous Girl" is a double portrait. One side is blind love, love in the dark. The obverse
side is a failed marriage in clear view. (It failed because "even unhappiness loses its tenderness
and fascination.") A husband, from the back of a large audience, can see his wife seated on a
stage in the glare of the light and the public eye, "a spectator of his marriage that had come to an
end." She looks "smaller and more bizarre." When the lights suddenly go out in the auditorium,
the darkness "extinguished everything. It stripped the eyes of sight. . . . One was suddenly
naked in the dark from the boots upward. One could feel the hair on one's body growing and in
the chatter one could hear men's voices grunting, women's voices fast, breath going in and out,
muscles changing, hearts beating. Many people stood up. Surrounded by animals like himself
he too stood up, to hunt with the pack, to get out."

On the stairs he comes by accident up against his wife: "He heard one of the large buttons on his
wife's coat click against a button on his coat. She was there for a few seconds: it seemed to him
as long as their marriage."

Still in the dark, and like a dream, comes his discovery--it is his pursuit--of "the marvelous girl."
And afterward, when the lights come on again, "they got up, scared, hot-faced, hating the light.
'Come on. We must get out,' he said. And they hurried from the lighted room to get into the
darkness of the city."

We read these stories, comic or tragic, with an elation that stems from their intensity. In "When
My Girl Comes Home" Pritchett establishes a mood of intensification that spreads far around and
above it like a brooding cloud, far-reaching, not promising us to go away. We are with a family
in England 10 years after the last World War as they face the return of a daughter, gone all this
time, who is thought to be a prisoner of the enemy. Hilda, "rescued" at last from Japan, where
she had not, after all, been tortured and raped but had done very well for herself, brings on a
shock as excruciating as it is gradual when her shifting and cheapening tales begin to come out.

The youngest boy muses: "We must have all known in our different ways that we had been
disturbed in a very long dream. We had been living on inner visions for years. It was an effect
of the long war. England had been a prison. Even the sky was closed, and, like convicts, we had
been driven to dwelling on fancies in our dreary minds. In the cinema," he says, and that cloud
begins to reach overhead, "the camera sucks some person forward into an enormous close-up and
holds a face there yards wide, filling the whole screen, all holes and pores, like some sucking
octopus that might eat up an audience rows at a time. . . Hilda had been a close-up like this for us
when she was lost and far away."

In the shock of reunion, the whole family--several generations and their connections--sees
appearing, bit by bit, the evidence that all of them have been marred, too, have been driven, are
still being driven and still being changed by the same war. Alone and collectively, they have
become calloused as Hilda has been and, in some respect of their own, made monsters by their
passage through an experience too big for them, as it was too big for Hilda--for anyone.

"Hilda had been our dream, but now she was home she changed as fast as dreams change," the
boy tells us. "She was now, as we looked at her, far more remote to us than she had been all the
years when she was away."

Finally, it is not Hilda's errant life in Japan but the "rescue," the return to the family circle, that
wrecks her imperviousness. It wrecks the life at home, too. When the young narrator finds
himself alone at the end with Hilda, "I wanted to say more. I wanted to touch her. But I
couldn't. The ruin had made her untouchable."

None of the stories is livelier than these new stories of Pritchett's written of old age. Old
bachelor clubman George is militant, astringent, biting, fearsomely grinning, in training with his
cold baths, embattled behind his fossilized anecdotes, victoriously keeping alive ("he got up
every day to win") on the adrenaline of outrage and of constituting himself a trial and a bore to
everyone. But afraid. Afraid not of the North wind but of the East wind, afraid not that the Arch
Enemy will get him but that the building will be sold out from under him.

"'O God,' he groaned loudly, but in manner so sepulchral and private that people moved
respectfully away. It was a groan that seemed to come up from the earth, up from his feet, a
groan of loneliness that was raging and frightening to the men around him. He had one of those
moments when he felt dizzy, when he felt he was lost among unrecognizable faces, without
names, alone, in the wrong club, at the wrong address even, with the tottering story of his life, a
story which he was offering or, rather, throwing out as a lifeline for help."

What wins out over George is not the East wind or the Arch Enemy but the warm arms of a
large, drinking, 40-year-old woman with a kind disposition and a giggle for his indignation, who
"drops in" ("What manners!") out of his past that he had thought safely sealed behind anecdotes.
She was the woman the old man had admired once "for being so complete an example of
everything that made women impossible."

It is thus that he faces "the affronting fact that he had not after all succeeded in owning his own
life and closing it to others; that he existed in other people's minds and that all people dissolved
in this way, becoming fragments of one another, and nothing in themselves. . . . He knew, too,
that he had once lived, or nearly lived."

Of all the stories of desiring, and of all the stories in this collection, "The Camberwell Beauty" is
the most marvelous. It is a story of desiring and also of possessing--we are in a world of antique-
shop keepers--and of possessing that survives beyond the death of desiring. It is a closed world,
one that has its own hours, its own landscape inside nighttime warehouses, its edges the streets
beneath sodium lights. It has its own breed of people, its own language, its codes and spies and
secrets and shames, jealousies, savageries, fantasies. And like some fairy tale itself, it has its
own maiden, carried off and shut up and, you and I would think, wanted to accept rescue, but
provided with a bugle to play if this should threaten.

"It broke my heart to think of that pretty girl living among such people and drifting into the
shabbiness of the trade," says the young man--he is also of the trade--who discovers her and loses
her when an old man named Pliny carries her off for himself and shuts her up in his shop. The
boy cannot forget how she had written her name in the dust of a table top and left it unfinished:
"I S A B--half a name, written by a living finger in the dust."

The young man is left "with a horror of the trade I had joined." He abhors "the stored up lust
that seemed to pass between things and men like Pliny." It is not long before "the fever of the
trade had come alive in me: Pliny had got something I wanted." The end is unescapable--for all,
that is, who are connected with the trade.

"The Camberwell Beauty" is an extraordinary piece of work. Densely complex and unnervingly
beautiful in its evocation of those secret, packed rooms, it seems to shimmer with the gleam of its
unreliable treasures. There is the strange device of the bugle--which, blown by Isabel, actually
kills desire. All the while the story is filled with longing, it remains savage and seething and
crass and gives off the unhidable smell of handled money.

Most extraordinarily of all, it expresses, not the confusion of one human desire with another, not
sexuality confused with greed, but rather the culmination of those desires in their fusion.

"How unreal people looked in the sodium light," the defeated boy thinks as he walks in the street
at the story's end. Or by the light of their obsessions.

Each story's truth is distilled by Pritchett through a pure concentration of human character. It is
the essence of his art. And, of course, in plain fact, and just as in a story, it is inherent in the
human being to create his own situation, his own plot. The paradoxes, the stratagems, the
escapes, the entanglements, the humors and dreams, are all projections of the individual human
being, all by himself alone. In its essence, Pritchett's work, so close to fantasy, is deeply true to
life.

Eudora Welty's most recent book is "The Eye of the Story," a selection of her essays and
reviews.